Russian Attempts to Destabilize British India

The exploits of British officers, explorers, and adventurers furthering the interests of the British Empire in Central Asia are well-known and respected for their courage and dedication to the British cause.  Similarly, British paranoia regarding Russian aggression toward India is well-documented in the writings of Moorcroft, Burnes, and Curzon, among others, particularly in the modern belief that an invasion of India from Persia, Afghanistan, or Chinese Turkestan would be such an arduous task that the threat was negligible.  Less-well-known, at least in the West, are the intrigues and courage of for the Tsarist and Bolsheviks agents operating in Central Asia, and the real nature of Russian designs on India.

Russian agents were active in Central Asia for reasons ranging to a desire for territory bounded by natural borders, desire to open colonial markets, and desire to disrupt the power of their perceived enemies by attacking their possessions.  Russian interest in Central Asia in general, and India in specific was first expressed by Peter the Great, an interest that was to be continued by his heirs.  The expression of Russian interest took many forms, from invasion attempts to trade delegation to the encouragement of revolutionary movements.

Peter the Great was the first Tsar to recognize the benefits of adding even a portion of India to his domains.  Anxious to prevent France and Great Britain from seizing the entire subcontinent for their own purposes, the Tsar remembered a diplomatic offer that he had long set aside.  The Khan of Khiva had offered to become his vassal if offered Russian protection from his enemies.  Given Khiva’s location halfway between Russia and India, and its access to the Oxus river, Peter decided to see if the offer was still open.  To secure the cooperation of the Khan, the Tsar sent a well-armed force to act as either a guard for the Khan and his family, or to seize Khiva if there was resistance.  The force sent to Khiva numbered approximately 4,000 men and included infantry, cavalry, and artillery.  The force commander was Prince Alexander Bekovich, a Muslim convert to Christianity.

After an arduous march, the Russians arrived at Khiva and Bekovich plied the Khan with gifts to ensure a positive reception.  Coming to meet with Bekovich, the Khan suggested that the Russian troops be quartered in nearby villages to avoid over-straining the city’s resources.  Over the objections of his officers, Bekovich assented.  The result was disaster for his entire force. Once Bekovich’s army was dispersed the Khivans struck, brutally slaying all but forty of the Russians.  Most of these forty were allowed to return across the desert to Russia, but some were sold into slavery.  In an example that is familiar throughout the Russian and British involvement in Central Asia, no punitive expedition to Khiva was mounted by Peter the Great, who was too distracted by events in the Caucasus to avenge his men. Russia did not turn a blind eye toward events in Central Asia for long.  Forty years after Prince Bekovich went to his death in Khiva, Catherine the Great considered a plan to march her armies overland to India, appealing to local Muslim potentates along the way to join her armies to free their oppressed Indian Muslim brethren from the British.  Catherine never embarked on the plan, but it serves to illustrate that India had not slipped from Russia’s consciousness.  Indeed, her successor, Tsar Paul I developed a fascination with conquering India that drove him to first approach Napoleon with a plan for a joint Franco-Russian invasion of India of approximately 70,000 men.  Again, the plan called for gaining the sympathy of local tribesmen by saying that the invaders had come to free them from the oppressive British.  Napoleon declined Paul’s offer, believing that it was totally unworkable.  Despite Napoleon’s refusal, Paul sent a forces of his own, numbering 22,000 Cossacks and supporting artillery, which left Orenburg for India in the dead of winter without maps detailing any part of the journey past Khiva.  The mission was saved from certain disaster by Paul’s assassination and proclamation of his heir Alexander I as Tsar.

Later Russian attempts to infiltrate the Central Asian regions between their territory and British India were more cautious in nature, and functionally similar to British exploration and diplomatic missions of the time.  The first of these sent Captain Nikolai Muraviev to Khiva to offer the Khan the friendship of Mother Russia, but to also assess Khiva’s military capabilities, economic strength, and to find any information possible about the many Russian slaves sold in the markets of Khiva and Bokhara.  After making his way to Khiva, Muraviev was kept prisoner for seven weeks before receiving an audience with the Khan.  In a stroke of fortune for Muraviev, the Khan agreed to send Khivan officials back to Tiflis (modern Tbilisi) with him to negotiate trade status and alliances.

While preparations for the return trip were made, Muraviev completed the part of his mission that had the greatest consequences for the future of Central Asia.  After making contact with Russian slaves, he learned that there were at least 3,000 held in the lands governed by the Khan, and that many were treated with utmost cruelty.  This information he reported to Tsar Alexander I, who did not make immediate use of it, being distracted by affairs in Europe. However, the number of Russian slaves and the conditions of their bondage provided “an excellent excuse for their subsequent expansion into Muslim Central Asia.”

Closer to British India Russian intrigues were a bit more subtle.  Captain Yan Vitkevich was dispatched to Kabul bearing a message offering friendship and goodwill between the Tsar and Dost Mohammed, the ruler of Afghanistan.  Vitkevich’s reception was not particularly warm, and the British agent Alexander Burnes was asked by Dost Mohammed to verify the Russian’s identity and purpose in Kabul.  Burnes agreed that the Russian was likely who he claimed to be, and his messages genuine, although it would have better served his nation for it to be otherwise.

Vitkevich was treated shabbily until the British made a critical mistake in their dealings with Dost.  In a misguided and arrogant attempt to safeguard their interests, Lord Auckland sent Dost a personal letter informing Dost that he should give up any hopes of recovering his former domain of Peshawar from the Sikhs and forbade him from entering any alliances with Russia or any other power without British permission.  Further, Auckland asserted that any dealing with Russians would induce the British to allow the Sikhs to continue their aggression unchecked and that he would be removed from his throne.  The results were predictable.  Dost cast out Burnes, who he considered a friend, and received Vitkevich with all honors.  Peter Hopkirk believes that the Russian was able to achieve his goals in Kabul by simply out-waiting his rivals and exploiting their mistakes.      

Russia was not so fortunate in her next venture to counter British power in Central Asia.  In 1839, General Perovsky marched for Khiva with the intention of seizing it to use as a base for future moves against British India.  With a force of 5,000 troops and 10,000 camels, Perovsky moved south in the dead of winter.  It was the misfortune of his command that the winter was especially harsh.  After months of marching, the army headed back to Orenburg.  When the bedraggled group finally made it back over 1,000 men had died, along with 8,500 camels.

Not all Russian attempts at drawing the Khanates into their sphere of influence were subtle in nature.  In Tournament of Shadows, Meyer and Brysac report that Captain Nikiforov played on the fears of Khiva’s Khan, Allah Quli, telling him that if the British had made up their minds to absorb him or his neighbors the only way to preserve his throne was by way of a “firm alliance” with Russia, who would send troops to defend him.  This is a clear example of Russian willingness to try methods other than force to extend the Tsar’s influence into Central Asia by means of diplomacy, rather than force.  Russian willingness to use diplomacy continued in 1858, when Tsar Alexander sent a mission led by Count Nikolai Ignatiev to Central Asia to establish commercial links between Russia and the Khanates, and to counter British influence.  Like his British counterparts, a significant portion of Ignatiev’s mission was devoted to gathering military and political intelligence.

The first stop for the mission was Khiva, site of a large amount of the Russian-British competition in Central Asia.  Ignatiev borrowed the British stratagem of bringing bulky, but extremely valuable gifts to the Khan, which forced him to travel upriver to deliver them to the Khan.  This had the added benefit of allowing Ignatiev to plot the course and channels of the Oxus, a valuable bit of intelligence for both trade and invasion.  The river journey ended at Khiva at the insistence of the Khan, who also would not open his markets to Russian trade.  However, he did allow the mission to progress onward to Bokhara, where Ignatiev successfully negotiated a trade agreement and gained other temporary concessions from the Khan at the expense of the British.  The most valuable result of Ignatiev’s mission was not the Bokharan trade agreement or the temporary amity of the Khan, but the military intelligence gathered at both Khiva and Bokhara.  If nothing else, the tour provided Russia with the information necessary to carry out a successful invasion in the future.

Typically, the Russian invasion of Central Asia did not occur over the routes painstakingly ferreted out by Vitkevich and Ignatiev, but in a region known well to Russian merchants – Tashkent.  In 1865 Major-General Mikhail Cherniaev seized a golden opportunity offered by an incipient struggle for dominion of Tashkent between the Khan of Khokand and the Emir of Bokhara to invade the prosperous city.  Cherniaev used his force of only 1,900 men and twelve guns to storm the city walls in the dawn light of June 15^th. The general followed up his coup by promising not to interfere with the city’s Muslim religious practices and granted an amnesty from all taxation for a year.  Finally, he visited the bazaars to meet the townsfolk and drink tea with them.

Russian acquisitions in the region continued apace, especially after the arrival of General Kaufman in Turkestan.  Soon after his arrival, he used the pretext of a possible Bokharan invasion to occupy Samarkand, with few losses in 1868.  In 1871 Samarkand was followed by Ili, near both Siberia and Kashgar, which was annexed by Kaufman with the excuse that it was too vulnerable a spot to allow it to fall into the hands of Russia’s enemies.  Khiva finally fell to Russian invasion in 1873, avenging the slaughtered mission of 1717. The Russian juggernaut next crushed Khokand in 1875 and forced Kabul into a treaty of friendship in 1878, triggering the Second Afghan War.  The British swiftly won their war in Afghanistan, in which Russia did not intervene, and signed a treaty with the Emir that gave the British control of Afghan foreign policy in return for a large annual subsidy and protection from Russian invasion.

After being rebuffed in Afghanistan and a humiliating defeat by the Turkoman at Geok-Tepe, Russian armies were again successful in 1880, avenging their 1879 loss at Geok-Tepe in a brutal display during the sack of the city.  Geok-Tepe was followed by a peaceful Russian withdrawal from Ili, which had little strategic utility, and the 1884 capture of Merv from the Turkoman tribes.  The capture of Merv again demonstrated that Russia was not above using deception to defeat their enemies.  After occupying Tejend, eighty miles away, Lieutenant Alikhanov and a small party approached Merv and convinced the city into capitulating without a fight by claiming that they were the advance party of a large artillery equipped force, and that if the surrender was immediate not garrison would be stationed in Merv.  The ploy worked and Merv was Russian.

During this outburst of Russian expansion, British authorities became convinced that Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, known as Madame Blavatsky, was a Russian agent who used her leadership of the Theosophical Society to inflame Indian nationalists. There is ample evidence that Blavatsky may have been connected to Russian intelligence operatives, partially based on a letter she wrote in 1872 to a Russian Director of Intelligence that laid out her qualifications and stratagems for ensnaring the naive and unwary “...must confess that three-quarters of the time the spirits spoke and answered in my own words...” Whether Madame Blavatsky deliberately fed the flames of Indian and Sikh nationalism will probably remain unknown, but the net effect was for British authorities to spend time and resources watching her movements and her associates for signs of subversion.  The emphasis on Blavatsky and her high profile in European and Indian society surely allowed actual Russian agents to operate more freely and in blissful obscurity.

Russian tweaking of the British did not stop at the possible exploitation of the occult and esoteric services of the likes of Madame Blavatsky.  They also allowed Indian subversives such as Duleep Singh to find safe haven in Moscow.  While Meyer and Brysac assert that this was likely due to Britains harboring of Russian revolutionaries, they also note that Singh promised Tsar Alexander III an easy conquest of British India.

Russian slyness played a crucial part in Russia’s next major acquisition, as did Alikhanov, now a Colonel. With the British seemingly ready to go to war to protect the Afghan border town of Pandjeh, the Russians agreed to attack the town unless first attacked, which meant that the Afghans would have to be the aggressors if war between the two empires was to be avoided.  At this point it was up to Alikhanov to provoke an incident.  To achieve this, Alikhanov wrote an incredibly insulting letter to the Afghan commander at Pandjeh, which accused him of cowardice.  Due to British counsel Alikhanov’s trick did not work and the Afghans maintained their defensive posture. During this time, Russian troops continued to advance, and they issued an ultimatum: withdraw or be forced out.  The ultimatum provided a five-day time frame for the Afghan withdrawal.  At the end of the five days, the Russian advance continued and, according to Colonel Alikhanov, an Afghan opened fire, wounding a horse.  As expected, the Russian force opened fire on the Afghans and slaughtered them.  The Russians had added another town to their empire.

Pandjeh was the last major town of Central Asia to fall to the Russian advance, which is not to say that they immediately lost interest in capturing Indian trade or enhancing the status of the Russian Empire.  To avoid open warfare with the British, they turned east, running a railway from Moscow to Vladivostok to promote Far Eastern trade.  The new rail link was expected to allow exploitation of Siberian resources and to cut into Britain’s monopoly on seaborne trade from the East.  This of course also allowed rapid transport of Russian troops and materiel from West to East, which was bound to cause concern for both China and Japan, the main powers on Asia’s Pacific coast.

Competition between the Russian and British Empires came to an end in 1907 with the Anglo-Russian Convention, which formally recognized that Afghanistan lay in Britain’s sphere of influence.  For her part Russia agreed to send no agents to Afghanistan and direct political inquiries to London.  Likewise, Britain agreed to maintain Afghanistan as an independent state and to discourage Afghan hostilities toward Russia.  The matter of Tibet was resolved by both sides agreeing to routes all dealings through China and to not interfere with its internal affairs.  Persia was the most complex matter dealt with in the Convention.  Here, both empires agreed to support Persia’s independence and allow others to trade within its borders.  They also divided it into spheres of influence that were not completely unlike those the allies maintained in West Germany after World War II.  At least until the 1917 Communist Revolution, British and Russian competition in Central Asia was over.

Setting the East Ablaze: Lenin’s Dream of an Empire in Asia

Hopkirk, Peter. Setting the East Ablaze: Lenin’s Dream of an Empire in Asia.

Peter Hopkirk continues the skillful combination of informal narrative and historiography found in The Great Game with Setting the East Ablaze, an in-depth look at what he calls the end of struggle for empire among European powers in Central Asia.  Unlike his previous work, which was the multi-faceted story of Russian and British intrigues with and against the fierce tribes of the harsh lands between the northern borders of British India and the southern borders of the rapidly expanding Russian Empire under the Tsars, Setting the East Ablaze is primarily the story of British and Soviet intrigues against each other.  Although the peoples of Central Asia also have a significant part to play in this real-life tale of derring-do, they are the supporting cast who add life, meaning, and color.  They also pay the heaviest price of all of the groups involved in the “game”.

Hopkirk begins with the mid-1918 journey of Lieutenant-Colonel Frederick Bailey from Chinese Turkestan into Russian Central Asia.  He believes that the diplomatic mission of Lt. Col. Bailey’s party was doomed from the start due to the sudden worsening of British-Soviet relations following the execution of Tsar Nicholas and his family and the desecration of their bodies.  He also believes that if the conditions in Russian Central Asia under the new Bolshevik regime were fully understood in London or Calcutta Bailey and other British agents would have rightly been kept clear of the whole affair. As it was they ran headlong into a growing bloodbath that they were extremely lucky to escape with their lives.

Hopkirk draws on the accounts of various European witnesses to Bolshevik tactics in places like Tashkent, where he draws heavily from the memoirs of Danish Captain A.H. Brun, who had been dispatched to the region to protect the interests of the mainly Austrian and Hungarian prisoners of war held there.  Through the offices of Captain Brun, Hopkirk paints a compelling portrait of the chaos and horror of the Russian Civil War and the means the Bolsheviks were willing to use to secure power.  Although Brun arrived in Tashkent to a seemingly peace atmosphere, “Everything appeared orderly enough in the still dawn of Central Asia.  Turtle-doves fluttered over the low roof-tops.  Neat rows of silver-limbed poplars lined the wide streets of the model, colonial-built capital.” The illusions of tranquility were quickly shattered with Muslim demonstrations for the release of political prisoners and a messy battle between the Bolsheviks and the native population, followed by the declaration of an autonomous Muslim government of Turkestan that would have an elected assembly with one-third of the representatives being non-Muslims.  The Bolsheviks quickly responded to crush their opposition, based in Kokand, making use of many former-POWs.  Hopkirk declines to describe much of the actual battle and massacre, though the details he provides are horrifying enough: in an orgy of rape, murder, and plunder the Bolshevik troops killed between five and fourteen thousand defenseless townspeople and burned homes and mosques.  According to the Danish officer, A.H. Brun, “I was told that very one of the members of the Kokand expedition had become a rich man, 10,000 to 20,000 roubles being an average share, and 200,000 a man nothing surprising.” Hopkirk is quick to point out that many of the POWs joined the Red Army not out of belief in Communism or out of blood thirst, but to simply gain access to needed medicines, food and supplies, which were almost unheard of in the prisoner of war camps.

The Bolsheviks were not the only party guilty of atrocities and excess in the towns and on the battlefields of Central Asia.  When the Bolsheviks marched on Bokhara, several hundred Russians living in the town were massacred by rampaging mobs seeking vengeance in the only manner available to them.  The worst perpetrator of violence in the bloody period was most certainly Baron Roman Nicolaus Fyodorovich von Ungern-Sternberg, who fought all comers in an attempt to recreate a Mongol-Russian Empire based on his vision of a “Greater Mongolia”.  Ungern-Sternberg was generally acknowledged a complete madman.  A shining example of his madness comes from Dmitri Alioshin, a White Russian officer who claimed that while reviewing new recruits Ungern-Sternberg would examine each and decree one of three fates: service in the army, back to civilian life, or death. According to Hopkirk, hundreds were killed in this manner.  This was hardly the worst of the atrocities committed by Ungern-Strenberg and his men.  On one occasion, two rail cars full of Jews ran afoul of the Baron and were lynched.  On another, after the capture of Urga, young women were raped to death by squadrons of cavalry and a baker’s boy was baked alive in an oven

Amongst the depictions of chaos and horror, Hopkirk inserts an insightful discussion of political tensions between the Soviets, Great Britain, and India.  The Russian Revolution destroyed the fragile detente between Britain and Russia regarding Central Asia, as the Soviets coveted India for multiple reasons.  These reasons included gathering India’s economic resources for Soviet Russia and, failing that, depriving Britain of them.  Hopkirk bases this on Lenin’s belief that, “England is our greatest enemy.  It is in India that we must strike them hardest.” Combined with the failure of Communism to make significant headway against the governments of Europe, this led Lenin to push for greater Comintern emphasis on Asia, saying, “The East will help us conquer the West.” One of the more interesting stratagem’s Comintern tried was the “Army of God”, an attempt by Grigori Zinoviev to unite Muslims to march against the British “oppressors” in India.  Further Comintern plans against India included the creation of a military academy in Afghanistan.

Luckily for the British, diligent Intelligence gathering uncovered the identities of Comintern’s chief agents and their plans, even intercepting and reading almost all of their mail and cable messages.  This allowed them to completely disrupt planned actions and insurgencies in India, and provided fodder for the hawks in England.  In May of 1923, Britain sent an ultimatum to Lenin’s government insisted that all Soviet agents operating against British interests be removed from Britain and India.  The Soviets were predictably unimpressed, and their response indicated that they believed the British to be guilty of operating in their sphere of influence against Soviet interests.  They did finally agree to not support or provide funds to any organization “whose aim it is to spread discontent or foment rebellion in any other part of the British Empire.” The real result was for the Bolsheviks to operate under the auspices of the Comintern, not their government, for the uses of deniability.

In an effort to hide future attempts at destabilizing British India, the Bolsheviks moved their area of operations from Persian and Afghanistan north to China.  The hope was that by helping the Chinese Communists, headed by Sun Yat-Sen, the Bolsheviks would gain a secure base of operations to launch insurgencies and invasions of India.  Simultaneously, British Communist agents working for Comintern were sent into India to surreptitiously build a Communist Party structure hidden behind a labor organization called the Workers and Peasants Party.  Despite the Bolsheviks best efforts at secrecy, British Intelligence quickly learned of their activities in China.  Hopkirk presents convincing evidence of this in the form of excerpts of reports from the Political Department of the India Office and the British Legate in Peking.  According to the Political Department, “There is evidence … that the Bolsheviks are arranging gradually to consolidate a position in the outlying portions of the Chinese Republic which border on India, from which, presumably, they hope to maintain a constant ‘direct attack’ in due course.” In September 1925, the British Legation notified London that the Bolsheviks were infiltrating Chinese Turkestan to attack India from the north.

A final bit of color that Hopkirk adds revolves around British internal political turmoil, particularly during the mid-1920s as Labour and Tory governments pursue conflicting foreign policy goals regarding the Soviets and Bolshevik expansion.  One extreme example of this is the hysteria by British conservatives upon the election of Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald as Prime Minister.  MacDonald granted diplomatic recognition to the Soviet government.  This and other moves caused a large rift to develop between MacDonald and British security organizations, which Hopkirk claims resulted in MacDonald’s defeat in less than a year as PM.

Setting the East Ablaze is an enjoyable combination of story-telling that brings the many well-known characters and events involved in the Soviet-British incarnation of the Great Game between World Wars to life.  Although there are some distinctive side-trips into events that do not strictly concern the rivalry between the two Empires, such as the escapades of the “Bloody Baron” Ungern-Sternberg and Enver Pasha in their attempts to create their own empires at the cost of the Communists, there is nothing that does not fit into the overall scheme of the work, and both episodes serve to demonstrate that there were other actors on the stage that had an impact in the struggle for Central Asia.

There are only two small flaws in an otherwise excellent work: the bibliography and index.  The bibliography is restricted to an alphabetical listing of sources, with no references to where the items are referenced in the text, and no accompanying notes.  This leaves it to the reader to investigate each source to find potential additional information in an almost blind manner.  The index is like the indexes in other Hopkirk works: it primarily lists individuals and locations, perhaps a specific location or battle.  Cross-referenced subject areas that would allow easy direct access to a topic are notably absent.  Both issues are small and easily overlooked. Any student of history wanting more than a dry recitation of the events concerning the British and Russian struggle in Central Asia will find that Setting the East Ablaze adds the missing textures to the discussion that brings history to life.

The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia

Hopkirk, Peter. The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia.

At first glance, Peter Hopkirk’s The Great Game looks like the typically massive tome describing the events or people of British and Russian competition in Central Asia during the 19^th century.  Happily, Hopkirk’s volume goes above and beyond the rest to not only provide insight into the character of the men risking their lives in the deserts and passes of Central Asia for King and Country, but adds almost exhaustive detail regarding the events of the Great Game and the underlying assumptions that fed both British and Russian paranoia regarding their Asian frontiers.

Hopkirk organizes his work chronologically, breaking his chapters into three sections, each focusing on a different era, providing a discrete beginning, middle, and end.  Although the entire work is valuable and presents the events and personalities involved clearly and with much of the additional insight that is absent in other works, the first section, titled “The Beginnings” may be the most valuable.  This is particularly true for those unfamiliar with the details of the British conquest of India and Russia’s collective paranoia of invasion from the East after centuries of Mongol domination, which are both touched on in sufficient detail that the preoccupation of both sides with security of their borders is understandable.

The meat of The Great Game begins with the Mongol conquest and domination of Russia in the 13^th century and the subsequent Russian overthrow of the Golden Horde in the 15^th century.  Ivan the Terrible began the Russian colonization of Asia after defeating Kazan and Astrakhan, when he sent his people east across Siberia.  The colonization of Siberia was the beginning of the Russian quest for secure borders bounded by natural defenses, which would bring the conflict with the British Empire.

The background Hopkirk provides for the British-Russian conflict in Central Asia sets it apart from works like Tournament of Shadows by Meyer and Brysac because unlike them he provides the explanation for British paranoia regarding the defense of India from Russian expansion.  British paranoia was based on two factors: The primary factor being India’s economic importance to the British Empire, which caused it to be considered the “jewel of the Empire”.  The second factor was the long history of Russian attempts to move into areas that provided potential invasion routes to British India.  The first of these came in the reign of Peter the Great, who wanted to move his nation onto an equal economic and social footing with the rest of Europe.  After expensive wars with Sweden and Turkey, he decided to belatedly accept an offer from the Khan of Khiva to become his vassal, which Peter now saw as an easy way to gain a staging area to move forces into India to lay claim to the riches flowing to Europe from French and British possessions.  Treachery on the part of the Khan led to the complete destruction of the 4,000 officers and men of the Tsar’s delegation.  Only Peter the Great’s preoccupation with his expansion in the Caucasus regions prevented a punitive expedition back to Khiva.

Hopkirk details every conceivable Russian stratagem to move into Central Asia with an eye to occupying India, or at the least fomenting rebellion among its native populations.  Plans were made during the reign of Catherine the Great to march an army overland through Bokhara and Kabul to “restore” the Muslim-dominated Mughal Empire and raise the native subjects of British India in rebellion.  This plan came to naught, although Catherine did expand her domains in the Caucasus and conquer the Crimea.

A further early Russian attempt at an Indian invasion appeared under Tsar Paul I, who dispatched a force of 22,000 Cossacks supported by artillery to invade India and drive the British out while simultaneously freeing all Russian slaves in the region.  Only Alexander I’s accession to the throne prevented the invasion from going forward.  This expedition would have likely ended in disaster as it set out in the dead of winter and had only maps to Khiva, approximately halfway between India and Russia.  The Cossacks also had little information regarding terrain and scant provisioning for crossing the deserts that lay in their path.  It can only be assumed that the disaster would have been analogous to Napoleon’s invasion of Russia and the destruction of his Grande Armee.  To this point, the British were blissfully unaware of Russian designs on India, according to Hopkirk.

Hopkirk attributes the British awakening to the vulnerability of India to Napoleonic attempts to harass their interests and cut off their communications with the East by his invasion of Egypt, a key stop for couriers traveling east, rather than taking the 9-month voyage around Africa.  The Napoleonic threat happened to coincide with British diplomatic mishandling of their treaty with the Shah of Persia, with whom they had signed defense and commercial treaties.  When Russia invaded the Persian possession of Armenia, the British refused to assist Persia against the Russians, saying that the agreement was for an alliance against France and Afghanistan.  Hopkirk wisely sidesteps any discussion of whether the British acted correctly in the case, only noting that it would come back to haunt them.

The Shah’s irritation with the perceived British abrogation of the treaty provided an opening for a French treaty with Persia that modernized its military, ostensibly so the Persians could recover their lost territory in Armenia and Georgia.  British perceptions were that this new army would be used by the French to invade India, which was confirmed upon the discovery of a Franco-Russian agreement to divide the world between them, with Russia getting India.  If there had been any doubts regarding Russian interest in British India, this erased them.  In due course, Napoleon invaded Russia, which ended their joint plans for world domination, and British diplomats mended ties with Persia, promising to assist in the defense of Persia against all aggressors, even if they were technically allies of the British.  British advisors arrived to help with the Persian Army’s modernization and to map out the geographical approaches through Persia to India.

In discussing British and Russian (indeed European) interest in exploration and geography, Hopkirk again separates his work from those like Tournament of Shadows that merely describe characters and events.  Hopkirk goes beyond this to illustrate the how and why of exploration, while still focusing on the men performing the tasks.  Although the focus on methods and characters is important and interesting - The Great Game would be deadly dull if it were a dry analysis of events and political motives - the true value is in the discussion of why.

Hopkirk lays the beginning of anti-Russian sentiment in Great Britain squarely at the feet of Sir Robert Wilson, who returned from observing the Russian defense against Napoleon to immediately begin attacking the current vogue of romanticization of the Russian soldier.  Wilson used his experiences to paint a portrait of Russian and Cossack atrocities on the battlefield, and to claim that Russia was continuing to build its army and expand its territory in an effort to accomplish Peter the Great’s command to conquer the world.  Wilson showed this in pamphlets and books, pointing to Alexander’s acquisition of 200,000 square miles of territory and 13 million subjects, while increasing his army from 80,000 to 640,000.  Hopkirk supports his claim of Wilson as the original Russophobe by quoting his various publications and speeches.  The material presented is certainly convincing.  Russia’s subsequent attacks on the possessions of the Shah of Persia show that, at least in some respects, Wilson was right.  The Russian campaign saw numerous atrocities, including the bayoneting of 4,000 Persians who persisted in their defense of their stronghold of Lenkoran, located three hundred miles north of Tehran.

Tensions between Great Britain and Russia ebbed and flowed during the earlier to middle 19^th century, including a decade long period of “detente”, including an uneasy peace.  This peaceful period came to a close with the Crimean War, which Hopkirk describes as a struggle revolving around issues that did not even involve British interests.  As a result of British involvement on the Turkish side of this dispute that arose from disagreements between the Turks and Russians over access to the Holy Land for pilgrims.  To distract the British, Russian agents convinced Persia to seize Herat by telling the Shah that the British were no longer concerned about defending this approach to India and would not be disturbed.  The British response was to bombard and seize Bushire, in the Persian Gulf, which persuaded the Shah to relinquish Herat again.

Although Hopkirk does not make an explicit connection between the Herat episode and Russian aggressiveness in Central Asian territorial expansion following the Indian Mutiny, it is obvious from the structure of his text that they are part of a related trend.  Part of the Russian advance involved the same types of exploration and intrigue that the British used.  In the Russian case, a Colonel Ignatiev, who visited Khiva to open its markets to Russian trade and gather intelligence, led it.  Ignatiev followed this visit by negotiating in Bokhara for the release of Russian slaves, trade access, and to avoid diplomatic contact with the British.  The Russians followed their intelligence gathering with conquests in Khokand, Khiva, and Bokhara.  Hopkirk claims that this activity had three goals: to further extend Russia’s borders and buffer areas, to open Central Asia to Russian trade in the hope of significant economic stimulus for the Russian economy, and to destabilize the British rule in India.

The Great Game  focuses on the continuing intrigue between Great Britain and Russia, especially the use of exploration and geographical societies to gather the intelligence of unknown lands for the defense of India, or its assault, depending on the point of view.  It is unnecessary to detail all of those adventures here, but it is important to acknowledge that in addition to the exploration of the passes from Afghanistan, Tibet, and Persia, Hopkirk includes the exploration of Chinese Turkestan in his narrative.  Particularly important is the sudden British realization that the passes of the Khyber were unnecessary for a successful invasion force.

Hopkirk concludes by questioning whether British concerns over a Russian invasion of India from the north were reasonable given the massive natural obstacles that lay in the way of such an undertaking.  He recognizes, though that this perspective is derived with the benefit of hindsight by modern historians, and acknowledges that to the actors it was an absolute possibility that required preparation of defenses.  Hopkirk’s work covers much the same territory as other volumes on the “Great Game”, but unlike them he combines an accessible narrative with the full scope of the conflict.  So, in addition to an easy read, the student receives all of the pertinent information regarding the conflict in Central Asia from the motives of both Russia and Great Britain, to the exploits of Vitkevich, Stoddart, Moorcroft, and Ignatiev, and the domestic political issues provided by the proponents of forward policy or masterful inactivity.  Hopkirk’s is certainly the most complete treatment of the subject available.         

Tournament of Shadows: the Great Game and the Race for Empire in Central Asia

Meyer, Karl E. and Brysac, Shareen Blair. Tournament of Shadows: the Great Game and the Race for Empire in Central Asia.

Meyer and Brysac set out to portray the entirety of what they and others have alternately called the “Tournament of Shadows” or “The Great Game” in its entirety, from the consolidation of the British East India Company’s power in the former Mughal domains through the final defeat of the Soviet Union’s Afghani puppet government by the mujaheddin in 1997.  They generally accomplish this grand goal in a sprawling six hundred-page tome that varies in tone from that of a novel like Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels to a peer-reviewed journal article.  Considering that parts of the text have previously appeared in The Quarterly Journal of Military History and other forums this is hardly surprising.

The overarching premise of Tournament of Shadows is that the regional competition between Great Britain and Russia for domination of Central Asia was pivotal to world events in other arenas.  However, while interesting, the data presented by Meyer and Brysac do not make a compelling case for this argument.  Even the emergence of Middle Eastern oil wealth does not necessarily support the claim that “Who rules the Heartland ... commands the World,” particularly given the increasing ability to replace petroleum products with renewable sources of fuel such as vegetable oil, bio-diesel, and ethanol to fuel vehicles around the world, much less the development of practical hybrid and electric vehicles  Still, Meyer and Brysac weave an interesting tapestry of characters and places that draw the reader into the Indian sub-continent and its intrigues.

While other authors give reasons of economics, trade, and security (for the Russians) as the primary motivators for British and Russian expansionism in Central Asia, Meyer and Brysac focus on British paranoia regarding security for India and national pride, with trade as a lesser issue.  The first of their enlightened Russophobes must be the renowned Sir John Macnaghten, the Secretary of the Political and Secret Department, who believed that the best response to suspected overtures toward Afghanistan’s ruler Dost Muhammed by Russian agents was a quick and dirty overthrow of his popular reign.  Although primarily directed at Russian influence, the true purpose was shrouded in accusations that Dost was conniving with Persia against the Sikhs in his former possessions in Peshawar.

Although Meyer and Brysac appear to have the greatest sympathy toward their British protagonists, they do not fall into the trap of excusing all of their actions and decisions.  Before even discussing the disastrous British adventure later called the First Afghan War, they illustrate the inherent flaws in the campaign, writing, “Only a willing suspension of disbelief can explain what came to be called the First Afghan War.” A critique of the four assumptions that Meyer and Brysac believe that the British leadership held follows, with a further assertion that the campaign was undertaken despite the fact that the fatal flaws of the endeavor were already evident.

The assumptions that the British made regarding the First Afghan War: that the Sikhs under Ranjit Singh would bear the brunt of the fighting, that the fall of Herat to Persia was imminent, that Dost Mohammed was a Russian pawn, and that the Afghans would welcome and support a British selected and led government, are obviously the type of fantasy held by those who believe that they can make reality conform to their desires or those who are not given proper advice and full information by their subordinates.  It is clear that many members of the government in British India pushed for war for their own reasons, but the situation with Ranjit Singh must have been obvious to even the most obtuse political leader.  An astute political leader himself, he maneuvered the British into providing forces to accompany his and to impose unpalatable economic and political terms in the form of tribute on the Afghan King to be set on the throne.

Meyer and Brysac dutifully detail the catastrophe about to befall the British in exquisite detail, including the poor sighting of the British garrison on flat ground dominated by hills on all sides when there was a stout, almost forbidding, fortress nearby, the inadequacy of British weapons (the venerable Brown Bess musket of American Revolution fame, and the duplicity of their Afghan tormentors who broke covenants and truce agreements at every turn.  The end results being that the British perished almost to a man, many with their families.  However, the authors do not take the strictly dispassionate tone found in much modern historical writing.  Throughout, the episode bears the air of a great tragedy, as if a trusted comrade betrayed the hero of a Greek play.  In this, they hark back to an earlier era of writing when respected scholars such as C.W.C. Oman heaped scorn or praise upon the shoulders of those they wrote about.  The idea behind this style of writing is obvious: a likeable protagonist makes for an easier and more interesting story.  This tendency in Tournament of Shadows makes for a more enjoyable read, but it also makes it more difficult to pull information from the text.

Meyer and Brysac continue in a similar vein through the course of the British occupation of India.  Their emphasis throughout is the ongoing conflict between Great Britain and Russia in Central Asia, and they examine the source of this conflict after beginning their narrative of events from the British perspective.  Like most other western scholars, past and present, Meyer and Brysac see the most imperative Russian goal as security for the Russian heartland.  Like their predecessors, they lay the almost paranoid security consciousness on two main factors: the long domination of Russia by Central Asian steppe tribes and the lack of any significant natural border to Russia’s east short of the Pacific Ocean or the Himalayas to the southeast.  Meyer and Brysac contend that the only method open to Russia for ensuring security was for it to conquer all of the territories from which it was vulnerable to attack, and then to rule them with a totalitarian fist. This particularly Russian preoccupation and tendency toward autocracy continue to serve as the main explanatory factors in Western attempts to explain the excesses of Soviet Communism, particularly under Stalin.

Again, Meyer and Brysac step outside the obvious thinking regarding Russian expansion toward the east and southeast, and demonstrate that Russian expansionism was simultaneously affected by two dissimilar groups: the Stroganovs were the Russian version of Britain’s gentleman-adventurer combined with a merchant-trader that appear to be a land-based version of Western Europe’s British and Dutch East India Companies.  Like the East India Companies, the Stroganovs sought fortune and glory for their monarch.  The other group led the advance eastward in the pay of the Stroganovs in the name of the Tsar.  These were the famous Cossacks, who conquered Siberia in the same manner as Cortez in America: using guns, germs, and steel.  The Cossacks used musket and pike against indigenous peoples who also had no natural defense against smallpox, which the Cossacks brought with them.  Meyer and Brysac equate the result with Cortez’ victory over the Aztecs.

Russian expansion toward the southeast is the ultimate cause of its pre-World War I, as it caused British paranoia about the loss of their possessions in British India.  This fear was almost entirely economic in nature, as the physical security of the British Isles was not threatened by the Russian expansion into Asia unless it is taken that trade with India was the main source of British economic power in the 19^th century.  In many respects this competition seems almost irrational on the part of British peers searching for a manly sport to engage themselves in and thereby gain prestige.

In the second section of Tournament of Shadows, Meyer and Brysac take a strange side turn into the British and Russian obsession with opening non-threatening Tibet to foreign trade and exploration, with the British even fighting a limited war using Maxim machine guns and modern artillery against the matchlock wielding Tibetans on the pretext of opening trade negotiations.  The result for the Tibetan forces was predictable.  What the British did not expect was public outcry against the war at home and abroad.

Here Meyer and Brysac take another odd detour, this time into the world of “competitive” geography.  Geography and exploration it seems were the arenas that produced the superstar media personalities of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries.  Central Asia presented an inordinate amount of blank, white spots on world maps, and so became a key hot spot for exploration.  The primary competition in Central Asia was between British and Russian explorers with one key exception: Sven Hedin.  The story of Hedin, like much of the rest of Meyer and Brysac’s treatment of Tibet and geography is an interesting aside that seems to add little to the advancement of their discussion of Empire creation in Central Asia.

Hedin was, in their words, “the lone Swede to take part in the imperial drama.’ The depiction of Hedin is of a man singularly focused on the fame that followed exploring untouched (by Europeans) places and mapping them out.  He did this with a religious zeal that earned him a reputation for utter ruthlessness, founded in part on his crossing the Taklamakan Desert at the cost of four men, seven camels, and two dogs.  His return trips to the desert found archaeological ruins and produced detailed maps. His feats of exploration won him degrees from Oxford and Cambridge, an honorary knighthood, and the Founder’s and Victoria Medals of the British Royal Geographical society.  All of this came to naught when members of the RGS for not being scientific enough and his subsequent adoption of Hitler and Nazi Germany criticized his methods of cartography and surveying as his preferred partners.  Meyer and Brysac assert that Hedin’s “conversion” to Nazism was not that of the political convert, but of the opportunist who seeks out the greatest available power, and in order to tweak the noses of the British who had spurned him.

The problem with this passage, and the subsequent passage dealing with 19^th century archaeology, is that it does little to advance the discussion of imperial conquest and competition among the British and Russian Empires, except in the matters of international prestige.  Meyer and Brysac attempt to connect archaeology to imperial regimes by harking back to Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798, writing “archaeology has been entwined with Europe’s imperial enterprise from the time Napoleon put to sea for Egypt in 1798 with 38,000 troops and a Commission of Arts...” (pg. 375) However, in focusing on the removal of artifacts and papyri immediately after discussion Sir Aurel Stein’s looting of Chinese relics and papers during his expeditions at Dunhuang, all Meyer and Brysac accomplish is to irrevocably tie imperial archaeology with grave robbery.

The final section of Tournament of Shadows is devoted to two topics: the American entry in Central Asian affairs and developments in Central Asia during the 20^th century particularly after World War II, with a focus on tensions between India and the People’s Republic of China.  It is particularly interesting to note that Indian leader Jawaharlal Nehru followed the British pattern of “forward policy” in claiming disputed lands between Tibet, China, and India and placing checkpoints run by his intelligence services to control India’s northern borders.  Meyer and Brysac believe that Nehru’s insistence on this policy was in order to provide strategic depth to allow for defense in case of conflict with China.  Unfortunately for Nehru and India, the result was a humiliating war with China that India’s smaller army had no chance of winning.

Meyer and Brysac conclude Tournament of Shadows by questioning whether the benefits of increased trade following imperial acquisitions truly stand up to objective cost-benefit analysis.  Meyer and Brysac fall on the negative side of this argument by presenting the case of the British possession Corfu, which had no strategic value and that no right-minded person would sacrifice anything to maintain.

Tournament of Shadows is a compelling read, primarily due to the engaging writing style employed.  The narrative imparts the feel of an adventure story, which makes the text accessible to a larger audience than the strictly academic historiography many volumes adhere to.  However, the focus of the work seems to wander from the strict discussion of Empire in Central Asia, unless the areas of geographical exploration and archaeological expeditions are taken to be promoting the ends of Empire in some manner.  The narrative style can also make it difficult for serious scholars to pull desired information from the pages, although it certainly provides a more emotional “feel”, or context, for the events described.  That said, Meyer and Brysac admirably fulfill their goal of assessing the age-old competition between Russia and Western Europe for the resources of Central Asia.

Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals

Lieven, Dominic. Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals.

In Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals, Dominic Lieven sets out to examine both the impetus toward the formation of empire as a methodology of governing territory, factors that all empires hold in common, and the elements leading to the demise of various modern European and near Asian empires.  His method is primarily to compare and contrast empires through the ages, and then to relate them to the development and experiences of the Russian and Soviet Empires that spanned Eurasia.  Although he admits that his methods and goals may be viewed as politically incorrect or not academically rigorous when examined according to the biases of current political science and economics thought, the depth of his comparative analysis and the force of logic behind his arguments is more than adequate to stand against criticism.

Lieven organizes his work according to topic rather than chronology, which greatly enhances its readability.  He devotes Part One to defining “Empire” as a political concept and the place of empire in global politics.  Part Two examines the British, Ottoman, and Habsburg empires, particularly contrasting them in terms of style of empire and the nature of their collective collapse.  Part Three is primarily concerned with the Russian Empire, its fall, and the evolution of the Soviet Union.  Finally, in Part Four, Lieven examines the aftermath of the empires discussed, especially relating the aftermath to the underlying issues related to the fall of those empires.

Understanding that a mutually understood definition of what “empire” means is a pre-requisite to any useful discussion of the role of empires in the world, Lieven begins there.  Lieven uses a multi-part definition of empire that may not be immediately intuitive to readers.  His primary definition of an empire is “a very great power that has left its mark on the international relations of an era” and that it further represents a “polity that rules over wide territories and many peoples.” He also defines “empire” as a form of government that is inherently not a democracy, or in his words “not a polity ruled with the explicit consent of the governed.” (pg. xi) Lieven believes that this represents a simple and unsophisticated definition of empire, and it may be if taken at face value.  However, it is clear that Lieven does no such thing.  Both in his Preface and in the later discussion of the dilemmas and nature of empire, he notes that not all empires are repressive, unpopular, or illegitimate in their governance.  Indeed, Lieven repeatedly links the continued success and existence of different empires to the existence of some high imperial culture that subject peoples can admire as being more advanced than their own.

Before launching into his exposition on the dilemmas facing ancient and modern empires, Lieven indulges in the almost requisite tracing of the word “empire” from its historical roots in the Roman concept of “imperium”.  He correctly links the words imperium and imperator with successful generalship.  Lieven believes that the traditional Roman view of the Emperor as a military figure survived into the modern era where the 20^th century emperors of Japan, Germany, and Russia rarely appeared in public in anything but a richly decorated uniform.  In the Roman context, Lieven shows the gradual drift from the authority of a Roman magistrate or general to that of monarch.  He also is careful to describe the Roman conception of Empire as a carefully defined legal and political system that was viewed as a universal monarchy for the “civilized” world.  One of the distinctions of the Roman imperial system is that many of the later emperors were neither Roman nor Italian in origin.  In the Roman Empire all of the subject peoples could aspire to the status of citizenship and membership in the senatorial class, which greatly distinguishes it from both the empires that preceded and followed it.

Lieven concludes his discussion of the Roman Empire by briefly identifying and describing the “heirs” to the Roman Empire, which he identifies as Western Christendom, Islam, and Byzantium.  He almost immediately launches into a discussion of the early European conception of empire followed by a discussion of the modern debate on the nature of empire and the ideological basis for the seemingly innate distaste for “empire” in modern liberal democracies.  Although the heirs to Rome are discussed more fully later in his work, Lieven doesn’t really provide enough background for his designation for the three groups as Rome’s heirs, particularly in the case of Islam, which can scarcely have been considered a unified empire at the time of the fall of the Western portion of the Roman Empire.  In fact, it appears that Lieven basis his entire inclusion of Islam as an heir to the Roman Empire almost solely based on the spread of Islam and the resulting linguistic, governmental, and ethnic similarities that spread with it.  However, it is difficult to accept his claim that the Abbasid and Umayyad caliphates were the heirs based on their geographical location and monotheistic religion.  The caliphates were certainly not Greco-Roman in character or philosophy.

Lieven presents the modern debate regarding empire as being divided into two camps.  The first camp sees empire in terms of the maritime colonial empire that Americans are familiar with, the thirteen colonies being the first to wage a successful war of independence against a remote imperial government.  The second camp sees empire as the extended territorial domains of a absolutist monarch, sometimes intertwined with a “universalist” religion such as Christianity of Islam, and operating on either the Roman model of devolved local control or the Han Chinese model of direct control by a rigid bureaucracy.  In either case, the camps agree with the modern liberal conception of empire as a totally negative, repressive, anti-democratic, and illegitimate regime.  Part of Lieven’s goal is to show that this is not necessarily the case.

He begins this task by comparing the Chinese Han and Roman Empires in existence at the beginning of the 1^st century AD.  Starting from the premise that despite their assimilationist nature, multi-ethnicity, and scope, the Han and Roman Empires were fundamentally different.  Where the Roman Empire utilized a small, almost informal bureaucracy, the Han used a vast rigid omnipresent bureaucracy to control their vast holdings.  While immediately noting that generalizations can be dangerous, Lieven draws the obvious conclusion that the different models are primarily the result of the differing philosophies governing the widely separated realms.  Where the Romans followed the well-known model of the rule of law and self-governance based on Greek philosophy, Roman law, and the primacy of the self, the Han Chinese followed the more communitarian model embodied in Confucianism and the Mandarin system, where the benefit of the greater community was prized and the individual was subjugated.  Predictably the two widely different philosophies resulted in incredibly different methods for the maintenance of Empire.

After examining the growth of the modern European state, Lieven finally launches into the meat of his discussion: the dilemmas facing modern empires.  Lieven believes that the modern European empire was born out of the need for Continental powers to acquire the resources to compete with the perceived threat of American and Russian economic growth.  To combat the potential of these two proto-powers, France, England, Germany, and Belgium set out to divide the “lesser” areas of the world amongst themselves.  While they were largely successful, Lieven argues that the patriotic nationalism necessary to create the mass conscript armies of the 19^th century for conflicts in Europe proper, combined with the increasingly democratic nature worked to ensure that European Empires could not last.  This is first evidenced in Europe proper as the Habsburg Empire felt the strain of ethnic nationalism within its borders, which were restricted to continental Europe.  Ultimately, ethnic nationalism in the Third World would overcome the weakened colonial powers after two World Wars.

            Most of Lieven’s text is reserved for his comparisons of the British, Ottoman, Habsburg and Russian Empires.  Each empire is placed in historical perspective including the defining elements involved in its rise and eventual fall.  Lieven further complements his analysis by contrasting the weaknesses of each empire with similar issues faced by the others.

The British Empire stands out from the others discussed as rivals to the Russian Empire as being in some way fundamentally different.  This is demonstrably true on multiple levels.  Of the Empires Lieven discusses, the British is the only one that can truly be considered a “maritime” empire with colonies primarily scattered around the globe.  The reason for this should be immediately obvious given Great Britain’s geographical location on a relatively isolated island.  While this difference greatly differentiates the British Empire from the other three empires that are the focus of Lieven’s work, the manner in which England governed its empire is a greater source of difference.  Although it had increasingly liberal and democratic traditions in its home islands (with the exception of Ireland) and allowed its “White” colonies primarily comprised of English, Scots, and Irish colonists great leeway in matters of local governance.  The “Non-White” colonies like India that primarily consisted of indigenous peoples had a variety of local governments.  In India’s case the colonial government was autocratic in nature.  Although he does not make a direct correlation with the Roman system, Lieven describes the nature of British imperial government as distributed and indirect in nature similar to that utilized by the Romans and relying in part on the cooperation of local elites.  To Lieven, the British Empire was a source of pride and loyalty to the majority of its subjects, a situation he finds to be the case in the majority of the Empires he studies.

Another contrast Lieven finds between the British and other Empires is in the nature of their formation.  While he believes that there is an economic aspect to the creation of almost all empires, Lieven shows that with the exception of the territories encompassed in the United Kingdom, Great Britain’s Empire was acquired for primarily economic means as a source of power and wealth for the financiers of London.  The various colonies also provided a much-needed place for the British to dump excess under-employed or dissatisfied elements of society, which maintained a certain degree of stability at home.

]In contrast, the Habsburg and Russian Empires were landlocked multi-ethnic empires created out of both economic and military concerns for the states that controlled them.  The Habsburgs had no extra-European possessions, which created an internal need for a dynamic economy and stable political situation.  Given its early location across the trade routes through the Ottoman Empire into Europe proper and an industrious populace this was possible until the rising pressures of ethnic nationalism began to cause political rifts in the Habsburg Empire during the 19^th century.  The aristocratically oriented, anti-democratic nature of the Habsburg Empire had no release for the rise in ethnic radicals during the 19^th and early 20^th centuries and growing economic and military weaknesses in the 18^th and 19^th centuries made the Habsburgs vulnerable to both Eastern and Western neighbors.  The relative weakness of the Ottomans and Russians reduced the real threat from the East, but Prussia and France were constant threats.  To provide themselves with an adequate defense, the Habsburg monarchs were forced into a series of alliances with greater powers to protect themselves even from the likes of Russia.

According to Lieven, the main contributor to the fall of the Habsburgs was ethnic conflict among the Slavic and Germanic populations, each of which were naturally drawn to other states.  This issue was exacerbated by the partition of the Empire into Austrian and Hungarian dominated sections, with each catering to its own populations and traditions to the detriment of their respective minority groups.  This eliminated Habsburg imperial cohesion and greatly contributed to the Empire’s military weakness.  Ultimately, lack of a true imperial identity and the profusion of ethnic groups caused the Habsburgs to become weakened and vulnerable.  Arrogant pride caused them to launch the First World War.

The Russian Empire is yet again different from the others discussed.  Like the Habsburg Empire, aristocrats, especially the Romanov dynasty, dominated the Russian Empire.  The Russian Empire’s location on Europe’s periphery gave it access to different markets and resources, particularly in the mountain regions of the Caucasus Mountains and in Siberia.  However, Russia suffered from many of the weaknesses of its location on the edge of European civilization.  Russian economic and military development were initially slow, gained dominance, and waned again.  According to Lieven, Russian expansion was both military and economic in nature, with economic expansion toward the South and East and military expansion toward the West and Northwest.  The Western expansion into places like the Baltics and Poland was undertaken in the name of greater security for the Motherland.  Like other multi-ethnic empires, Russia was beset with ethnic conflicts and regularly had problems.  In the Caucasus region, with its tradition of ethnic cleansing, even the Russians undertook mass deportation of subject peoples in order to reduce tensions.  Poland, however, presented a different set of problems.  Where the Roman, British, and other empires gained acceptance in part due to perceived economic and cultural supremacy over their subjects, the Poles had recent experience with their own nation state, traditions, language, and literature.  Poles felt that their native culture was more developed and advanced than that of the behemoth to their east, which provided a patriotic center for their resistance to Russian imperialism.

The weaknesses of the Russian Empire were many, and Lieven examines them all.  Briefly put, the political and economic situation brought on by World War I allowed the Bolshevik revolution to progress, changing the nature, but not the fact of the Russian Empire.  Lieven seems confused about whether he wishes to present the two political organizations as separate imperial entities.  The Soviet Union is provided its own subsection in the large discussion of the Russian Empire, denoting its status as different from the Romanov dynasty.  It is understandable to group the two units together, if only to point out the differences between them and to illustrate their common roots.

Lieven finds the problems facing the Soviets to be in some ways an extension of those facing the Romanovs.  Both imperial states faced wealthier foreign rivals.  For the Romanovs, the Rivals were Prussia, France, and England.  For the Soviets, the rivalry was primarily with the United States, but also with England and other Western states.  Both imperial states faced problems with ethnic tensions, although for the Soviets the severity of these was not obvious until the fall of Communism as an ideology.  Both imperial states faced issues of economic weakness and an obsession with security arrangements on their Western frontiers.  However, the causes of the fall of the two imperial states were radically different.  For the Romanovs the fall was caused by economic strains induced by the protracted war against the Central Powers in World War I, which led to the Bolshevik revolution.  For the Soviets the collapse of their Marxist ideology brought the ethnic tensions under the surface of their vast empire to forefront and the federal republics that formed the Union began to break away.  The similarities and differences between the two empires, combined with their historical connections, make it difficult to separate them completely.

Lieven wraps up with a separate discussion of Empire’s aftermath in each of his four objects of discussion.  This approach is valuable, particularly when wrestling with the moral and ethical implications of Empire.  With the exception of England’s “White” colonies and the majority of the former Soviet Republics, the fall of Empire is almost always accompanied by ethnic violence, political turmoil, and economic desolation, at least for a time.  An objective look at an empire’s fall should serve to quell the instinctive modern disdain for imperial systems, which is one of Lieven’s goals.

Lieven’s treatment of the causes of empire formation and the effects of imperial states is by no means exhaustive, and it is certainly not meant to be.  His goal appears to be to rehabilitate the conception of “empire” as a legitimate form of governance by showing that not all of the effects are negative.  Certainly, under the Habsburg, Ottoman, and Russian/Soviet Empires most of the ethnic bloodshed in Europe during the 1990s would not have occurred, whether through strict controls on weapons and movement, or through shrewd political maneuvers and the economic advantages of the imperial systems.  Given the current claims that the United States is embarked on a path toward “empire” this discussion of the possibilities and consequences of imperialism may be particularly apt.       

Religious Liberty in the United States: From the First Amendment to "Alternative" Religions

Gaustad, Edwin S. Proclaim Liberty Throughout All The Land: A History of Church and State in America.

Stein, Stephen J. Communities of Dissent: A History of Alternative Religions in America.

Edwin S. Gaustad and Stephen S. Stein both address the American ideal of free religious expression, although they approach the issue from radically different directions.  While Gaustad examines the origins of the 1^st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and the separation of Church and State across the breadth of American history, Stein adopts the narrower focus of religious dissent, its role in American society, and how religious dissenters are treated.  This allows students of American religious history to use these two volumes in combination to achieve a greater understanding of religious freedom in the United States, the role of religion in American society, and the struggle of the American people to practice universalist religions while accepting the rights of others to worship in different ways.

Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land provides Gaustad a medium to explore the parameters of religious freedom in the United States, which he does with the hope that “the foundations of religious liberty can be strengthened and made even more secure,” than they are today (Gaustad, xi).  Maintaining the strength and security of religious freedom is important to Gaustad as it was to the Founding Fathers, who believed that religious liberty was the cornerstone of democracy and the most significant American contribution to the world (Gaustad, x).  Because of the importance many American colonists placed on religious liberty, two separate types of protection are enshrined in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution: a clause preventing the Federal Government from establishing as official any specific religion, and a clause preventing the Federal Government from interfering in the practice of any religion.  For Gaustad and the Founders, this leaves the delicate question of how to draw the line between these two ideals (Gaustad, xi).

Unfortunately religious intolerance of both official and unofficial nature was an important part of American History, both in the Colonial era and more modern times.  Before 1791, Gaustad argues that legal persecution of religious dissenters was common in North American and Europe.  He provides the 17^th century examples of Jews forced to leave New York by its Dutch Governor, and of four Quakers executed for preaching heresy in Boston.  The 18^th century was no better for Americans with alternate religious views: in 1707 a Presbyterian minister was jailed for preaching in New York, and in 1774 several traveling preachers were imprisoned for their beliefs (Gaustad, xiii).

After the adoption of the Bill of Rights in 1791, religious persecution assumed a less official nature, but existed nonetheless.  Through the 19^th and first half of the 20^th century, anti-Catholic bias appeared in magazines dedicated to defeating “Romish corruptions”, the burning of a Massachusetts convent, and the 1850s Know-Nothing Party campaigns against foreigners, Jews, and Catholics (Gaustad, xiv).  In the 20^th century, anti-Catholicism reared its head in attacks on Alfred E. Smith’s Presidential campaign.

However, Gaustad writes that the later part of the 18^th century saw great strides in the extension of American religious freedom, particularly in reaction to the colonist’s perceptions of British abuses.  Great Britain made a habit of imposing political and religious orthodoxy over all conquered territory, including Scotland, Ireland, and the American colonies (Gaustad, 16).  Memories the secular power of Anglican Bishops in England, which many colonists migrated to escape, led some of them to claim that resisting political and religious tyranny were twin causes – political victory without “Liberty of Conscience” was incomplete because the King of England would still have the power to govern their minds (Gaustad, 17).  Opposition to the Church of England caused many colonists to refuse to accept English Bishops despite the fact that only bishops could ordain ministers or confirm young people in the faith.  For some this issue was related to the taxes imposed to support the opulent lifestyles of many Bishops in England, but John Adams took it farther, tying efforts to resist taxation by Parliament to religious freedom, writing that if “Parliament could tax us, they could establish the Church of England with all its creeds, articles, tests, ceremonies, and tithes,” (Gaustad, 19).

Although some states moved to disestablish the Church of England in 1776, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison began pushing for official religious freedom in Virginia in 1777, based on the belief that established churches forced a type of mental servitude on citizens (Gaustad, 22).  Their opponents attempted to take the middle road of providing State support for all Christian churches, but Madison and Jefferson rejected this as requiring the State to determine which churches were Christian, and which were not (Gaustad, 23).

At the Federal level, religious freedom was protected in two places.  The first was the Constitutional dictum in Article 6 that religious tests were not allowed for exclusion of candidates for office.  Despite some opposition, this measure was accepted because some delegates remembered how religious tests were used in England to exclude Catholics and Protestant dissenters alike, and because European Catholic countries also used religious tests to persecute Protestants (Gaustad, 27).  Some of the delegates refused to sign the Constitution without a guarantee that as the first order of Congressional business, a Bill of Rights including protection for religious freedom would be adopted (Gaustad, 29).

The 19^th century saw relatively little action at the Federal level regarding issues of religious freedom, particularly at the Supreme Court.  This is not to imply that religion did not play a role in American politics, just that there was little action by the Supreme Court in enforcing religious freedoms.  Religion was fairly important in political campaigns, as when Thomas Jefferson was falsely accused of being and atheist and anti-Christian in the 1800 election (Gaustad, 35).  Despite this, Jefferson was elected and introduced the concept of a wall separating Church and State; a concept that he believed prevented him from calling for national days of prayer.

However, the Supreme Court did hear a few important cases in the 19^th century.  The first of these was over the glebe lands held by the Anglican Church, which some Americans wanted seized.  The Court sided with the Church, saying that the Revolution did not overturn the Church’s corporate rights, and that the lands belonged either to the Church or its prior owners (Gaustad, 37).   A second case heard by the Court involved colleges founded by religious denominations.  When the states wanted to seize the colleges, the churches sued to keep them.  Again, the Court sided with the churches on the grounds of prior ownership.  Clearly, the justices were acting on behalf of free expression of religion (Gaustad, 39).  However, in what Gaustad calls the biggest case regarding religious freedom in the 19^th century, the Court sided with the Federal government.  In this case, Mormons sued to overturn Federal anti-bigamy laws on religious grounds. The Court ruled that churches were required to obey Congressional Acts that were meant to maintain social order, not limited to acting on matters of religious opinion.  In this case, the court believed that laws governing plural marriage were solely intended for the maintenance of social order (Gaustad, 46).

The 20^th century was much busier in terms of religious freedom cases before the Supreme Court.  Part of this was simply due to the Court’s adoption of the 14^th Amendment as a tool to apply the 1^st Amendment to the actions of the states (Gaustad, 50).  The 20^th century also witnessed an increase in cases as religious plurality led groups to sue over public religious displays, which required that some traditional practices be defended on Constitutional grounds (Gaustad, 51).  Gaustad also believes that the increase was due in part to the increased intrusion of the government in American’s daily lives, with issues of access to birth control, abortion, and sexual practices.

The use of the 14^th Amendment in cases of religious freedom opened new doors for interpretation of the establishment and free expression clauses of the 1^st Amendment.  It allowed the Supreme Court to hear cases where states were using religious tests for officeholders (Gaustad, 53).  It also allowed the Court to address state restrictions of access to contraception and abortion on religious grounds.  In the case of birth control, the court found that Connecticut’s ban on distribution of information related to birth control was not legal, and that states could not limit access to abortions because it effected poor women more than rich women, who could easily travel to areas with legal abortion if necessary (Gaustad, 58).  The Court also relied on the 9^th Amendment, which allows the Supreme Court to identify new rights that represent core interests to society.  In these cases, the Court identified the right to privacy as necessary to the health of American women.

The court also addressed the issues of nativity scenes sponsored by local governments, the use of Congressional and Military Chaplains, and church exemption from taxes.  In the case of nativity scenes, the Court ruled against them on the ground that they implicitly endorsed a specific religious practice, but it also found that Military Chaplains were acceptable because they were necessary to ensure the free expression of religious belief by military personnel and their families.  Clearly, the Supreme Court treads a complicated and difficult path in balancing the demands of the 1^st Amendment.

The issue of the role of religion in public and private schools also appeared before the Supreme Court in the 20^th century, regarding both the establishment clause and the free exercise clause.  Arguments regarding the role of religion in public schools are almost built in given Horace Mann’s influence in developing the American system of public education.  Mann set the standard by insisting that public schools not teach religious dogma, but could teach Protestant Christian values and use non-dogmatic texts and hymns for teaching (Gaustad, 74).  This combined with the early American use of religious primers for instruction to ensure that religion played a high profile role in public schools.  The Supreme Court ruled Mann’s approach illegal in 1869, but issues persisted into the 20^th century.

Gaustad identifies several key issues the Supreme Court addressed regarding religion and public schools: teaching religion in school, practicing religion in schools, and teaching subjects deemed religious in schools.  In these areas, the Court ruled to clearly define what activities violated the establishment clause.  The Court ruled that city schools could not have religious leaders come into the building to teach, but that they could release students early to attend religious instruction (Gaustad, 77).  The rationale was that by having instructors come to the schools, the government was in effect endorsing those religions.  Similarly, the Court ruled that schools could not require prayer at the beginning of the school day (Gaustad, 78), and could only teach portions of the Bible as part of a greater curriculum of study (Gaustad, 82), because both acts are designed to promote worship.  The Court’s ruling regarding teaching portions of the Bible directly relates to the debate over teaching evolution and creationism.  The Court ruled in 1968 that Arkansas could not prohibit science teachers from addressing evolution because the objection was entirely religious in nature.  In 1987, the Court extended this argument to say that the Biblical account of creation was not allowed in the classroom outside the context of examining different religions because it was designed to promote a single religious view (Gaustad, 88).

Gaustad wraps up by addressing the Free Exercise clause of the 1^st Amendment in the 20^th century, an area where the Court sometimes seems schizophrenic due to its frequently changing stances on similar cases.  The right of religious groups to distribute materials is a prime example of the frequent changes of opinion the Court experiences.  In 1942, the Court ruled that states could not require Jehovah’s Witnesses to get permits to distribute religious tracts or asking for donations, but in 1942, the Court reversed itself in a 5-4 decision.  In 2002, the Court reversed itself on this issue again, with Justice Sandra Day O’Connor opining that the idea that citizens need governmental permission to speak with their neighbors is offensive in a free society (Gaustad, 115).

Jehovah’s Witnesses provide the Court with another opportunity to repeatedly change its mind.  In 1940, the Court ruled that religious dissenters could be forced to salute the flag in school in order to promote national unity (Gaustad, 117).  However, just three years later, the Court reversed itself, deciding that compulsory loyalty oaths are counter to democratic ideals.  Justice Jackson wrote that no government official could determine religious or political correctness for other groups that are not are clear threat.

Stephen Stein’s entire work is about the issue of freedom of religious expression, and how it combines with the establishment clause of the 1^st Amendment.  In this way, it serves as a perfect complement to Gaustad’s Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land.  Where Gaustad examines the on-going development of religious freedom in the United States, Stein aims at the American History of religious dissent, and how religious dissenters are treated in American society.  The role of the 1^st Amendment is key in preserving the rights of religious dissenters, although it is sometimes amazing that a nation founded by dissenters needs such a formalized arrangement.  Stein’s argument is that while the 1^st Amendment does offer protection from official sanction of religious dissenters, they are frequently the targets of both official and non-official harassment.  This represents an interesting dichotomy when compared with American’s traditional celebration of political dissent (Stein, ix).  Stein’s main question is why religious dissenters evoke such strong negative reactions among Americans (Stein, x).  However, it is possible that Stein falls prey to the idealized notion that political dissent is a valued American trait.  This the conservative attacks on the New York City anti-draft riots during the Civil War, complaints levied at Vietnam War protesters, and the current conservative charge that any question of the war in Iraq or of the War on Terror is treason.

Before launching into the history of religious dissenters, Stein provides a foundation of academic language for discussing dissenting groups, which he believes is necessary to counteract the misuse of some terms in the American media.  Two terms he singles out for special consideration are cult and sect.  These two terms in particular have become increasingly pejorative epithets for certain small religious movements.  Stein directs readers to the original and more useful definitions of these words: cult is defined as the structured worship of, or tending, a deity while a sect is defined as a community that follows a particular leader or ideology (Stein, 5).  To avoid the modern built-in bias, Stein uses the terms alternative religions, outsider religious groups, marginal religious communities, and new religious movements to describe communities of religious dissenters.  The use of neutral language to discuss these groups helps develop an unbiased attitude toward his topic.

The question of religious dissent bedeviled Americans almost from the very beginning.  This is obvious from the nature of the most famous early colonists, the Puritans, who migrated to the New World in order to seek their own religious freedom after persecution by the Church of England.  Of course, the Massachusetts Bay Puritans then turned around to use governmental authority to quash religious dissent when it banished Roger Williams in 1635, followed shortly thereafter by Anne Hutchinson (Stein, 17).  Both Williams and Hutchinson directly challenged the religious doctrine of the Puritan congregations in Massachusetts, with Williams asserting that civil magistrates had no right to enforce religious rules (Stein, 15).  The Colonial and English experience with official religious persecution directly led the to the adoption of the 1^st Amendment to the Constitution.

Following Gaustad’s approach in Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land, Stein documents the history of major alternate religious groups in the United States, identifying their origins, beliefs, and the hurdles they faced from the larger American society.  This allows him to illustrate the gap between the ideal of religious freedom and the actuality of religious freedom.  What is interesting is that opposition to religious dissenters migrates from the threat of force in the early 19^th century to legal action during the 20^th century.  In June 1825, two large mobs forcibly returned a teenaged Shaker convert to her family, despite her protests that she did not want to leave the Shaker community (Stein, 50).  The Shakers were a pacifist religious community that moved from England to the Colonies to escape religious persecution, who believed that self-sacrifice was the key to righteousness.  Their refusal to bear arms during the Revolution led many to distrust them, and they suffered physical attacks, as well as charges of heresy (Stein, 52).

The key to some of the persecution dissenting groups faced was frequently their non-traditional social arrangements.  The leader of the Oneida community, John Humphrey Noyes, faced charges of adultery as a result of the group’s free love doctrine that espoused a complex marriage arrangement between the members of the group.  Noyes believed that sex should be part of the greater concept of Christian love, and believed that the complex marriage arrangement would solve problems introduced by the selfishness implicit in traditional marriage arrangements (Stein, 63).

Other alternate religious communities, like the Millerites, Seventh Day Adventists, and Jehovah’s Witnesses, focused on the Second Coming of Christ, which led opponents to ridicule them, or charge them with fraud when they raised funds for projects.  They were also frequently attacked in the mainstream press.  Although the free expression rights of these groups were sometimes restricted by government policies that forced them to obtain permits to distribute literature or raise money, they seem not to raise the ire that groups suggesting alternative social arrangements did.

One exception to this was the Federal Government’s suppression of David Koresh’s Branch Davidian group near Waco, Texas.  When ATF agents attempted to arrest Koresh on firearms charges in 1993, shots were exchanged, and an enduring standoff occurred between Federal law enforcement agencies and the Branch Davidians.  This ultimately ended in an accidental fire and the death of many of the Davidians, including women and children.  Stein portrays this event as an example of Federal persecution of alternate religious communities.  However, he does leave out some important information: in addition to the weapons charges the Davidians faced, Koresh was also accused of having sex with under-aged girls at the compound, which he made his “wives.”  There were also allegations of incest, as some of the girls may have been his daughters with other members of the group.  This does not absolve the Federal authorities of their role in the tragedy at the compound near Waco, but it certainly makes the issues involved less clear.  Stein also does not clearly make the case that the main issue was the religious dissent of the group.

Taken together, Communities of Dissent and Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land provide a significant examination of the historical basis for the 1^st Amendment, and how the Supreme Court interprets it.  The also provide a look at how Supreme Court decisions change over time due to changing attitudes, new arguments, and the composition of the Court.  Both texts also clearly show how the 1^st Amendment contributes to the growth of new religious movements, the issues those groups face in American society, and how the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the 1^st Amendment directly affects those groups.